I used to say Almost Famous made me fall in love with movies. It feels embarrassing now, like saying your favourite band is The Killers. Fine when you’re 14, cringe when you’re 30. Still, it was the first film that made me feel inspired to go out and make stuff. That glow eventually wore off when the 70s “I’m-with-the-band” fantasy stopped resembling anything close to real life. It doesn’t crack my Letterboxd Top 4 anymore, but there’s still a soft spot for it. So when I read the description for Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks as “Almost Famous from a girl’s point of view set in 2011 Montreal,” I felt suspiciously targeted. Even though it lowkey sounds like something my drunk friend would pitch me at 3 a.m, I still felt like it was a calling card for me.
Chandler Levack has been on my radar since she was a critic for The Globe and Mail, and then became a target of my envy with I Like Movies in 2021, where I walked out of the theatre muttering the most honest reaction a writer can have: fuck, I wish I wrote that. Her career arc of film student turned film critic turned filmmaker has always lived on my vision board, making her my unofficial mentor. I’m two-thirds of the way there, which is either inspiring or depressing depending on the day.
The opening of the film has Grace (Barbie Ferreira) scrawling notes in a pocketbook at a concert, announcing she’s a music critic. Meanwhile I’m in the movie theatre with my own tiny notebook, writing about her writing about music so I can write about it later. Then it cuts to Grace’s bedroom with an Almost Famous poster on the wall. The mirror does not flatter.
Mile End Kicks is set in a universe I unfortunately recognize: Montreal in the indie sleaze years. Grace wears American Apparel like armour. Peaches’ “Fuck The Pain Away” blasts in the club. Big Shiny Tunes is referenced twenty minutes in. Levack nails the texture of coming-of-age in Canada in the early 2010s. Where spreading your wings meant moving only one province away, from one city to a slightly cooler one. Just like me, like Grace, every girl was broke, annoying, and choosing the worst guy in the room on purpose. I miss it.
The cast takes the film far beyond nostalgia fodder. Ferreira doesn’t shy away from portraying Grace as a protagonist that’s hard to root for. She flakes on her only friends, misses rent, and sabotages amazing career opportunities. Her worst offence is probably her fixation on Chevy (Stanley Simon), the band’s smug frontman whose idea of flirting is “My dick just doesn’t get hard to you.” It’s refreshing, considering girlhood in movies is often polished into something aspirational. Devon Bostick is charming and excellent as Archie, the only band member who treats Grace like a person. He’s celibate, respectful, and therefore, doomed. Despite how much of Grace’s story revolves around dating band members, Levack still never sands her down to a manic pixie fan girl. She’s not the long-suffering groupie—though she dabbles in it—she’s the girl who wants to be the story, not just witness it.
Grace has a line near the end that says, “Maybe we don’t want to date the boy in the band. We want to be the boy in the band.” It comes off as both Grace’s and Levack’s manifesto, and that declaration is why Mile End Kicks works for me in a way that the films it drew from can’t anymore.
People are still writing 10,000-word think-pieces about Almost Famous, dissecting Cameron Crowe’s fantastical teenage-dom like it’s scripture. Meanwhile, women just… go out and make movies about what being young and annoying is actually like. Levack did it with I Like Movies, and she’s done it again here.
Despite the hyper-specific time and place, despite how Canadian-millennial-coded this thing is, it works in a universal way. It’s funny, unflinching, and has the bones to sit next to Frances Ha, The Worst Person in the World, and Reality Bites on the post-grad coming-of-age shelf. It captures the loneliness of being invited but not respected, the absurdity of wanting the wrong people to want you, and the way music is both salvation and trap. It’s the first film I’ve seen that treats girlhood in the indie-sleaze era as its own mythology, one without rose-colored glasses or Fleetwood Mac needle drops. If Almost Famous was fantasy, Mile End Kicks is hangover. And honestly, I’d rather have the hangover.